Earth Joy Writing

A few weeks ago, I led the participants in an Earth Joy Writing Workshop in Ashland, Oregon, in the following exercise. Ashland is a town famous for play: they have a world-renowned summer Shakespeare Festival there, they often get visitors who enjoy the mellow side of life, and the residents love the way the mountains and forest (and deer!) come right to their door. But after doing this exercise, many participants shared that they had actually forgotten how fun it is to play. Try this, and see how good it feels to remember: Go outside and recreate the action, the motions of your earliest gifts and talents as they were expressed outside in nature.

Allow your body to remember those early years of playing soccer, rolling down hills, making leaf rubbings and forts and fairy houses, fishing, swinging, swimming, climbing trees.

Recreate your body’s joy in expressing your talents, gifts, and early sparks of creativity in relationship with the earth.

Write about what you remember about your connection to the earth and how it may have changed over the course of your life.

This is a very busy time of year, especially for families as their kids and teens prepare to return to school. Let me tell you a secret about what I used to do when my daughter went back to school after being with me all summer: I took a nap. It felt indulgent. It felt naughty. Surely there was work I needed to do after making her a priority for three whole months! That’s exactly why I did it. Here’s your Earth Joy Writing prompt for this week:Make a point of slowing down today. Eat your breakfast slowly. Take a long time getting dressed. Drive in a patient way. Do your work at a relaxed pace. (Maybe even take a nap!) Unwind at the end of the day by simply resting. Then, in the morning, write about how this feels. Experiment with slowing down and then record the results that come from feeling you have an abundance of time.

A couple weeks ago, I shared the following excerpt from Earth Joy Writing with the participants at the workshop I gave at the New Renaissance Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. I share it with you now, in this season of harvest, so you can reflect on your own definition of “enough.”~There is enough.

There is more than enough.

It is just that some people have too much.

As we make individual choices in our practice of Earth Joy Writing, we begin to understand the impact of these choices upon the planet and the people upon it. We begin to see that every small act of an individual is connected to the larger collective reality on earth. And our choices, our acts, and our beliefs begin to change.We start to go beyond what is probable into what is possible.

We start to claim the power that we, like Dorothy, held inside ourselves all along.

There’s no place like home.

There’s no place like earth.

There’s no place like the powerful place within your heart, out of which all is made possible.

This is what fruition means: seeing the fruits of your labor from all the seasons of your life, gathering these fruits together, blessing them and sharing them with the whole community, and taking them into yourselves where they may nourish and feed and provide sustenance for coming generations.

Go ahead. Share the fruit. Eat the fruit together. There is more than enough.

WRITE ABOUT THIS...Write about a time when you didn’t have enough—food, money, shelter. What did you feel? How did others respond to you? How did it change you? Then write about a time you had more than enough—food, money, shelter. How did this make you feel? How did others react to you? How did it change you? What is the right balance of “enough” for you? What would it mean to live with abundance? **You may want to sign up for the bonus song, “Abundance,” on the Audio page, for inspiration!